Kill, clean, cook, four good books to read

by Cameron Slater on October 10, 2012 at 12:00pm

Kill, clean, cook. It tastes better. I am a big fan of stocking my own freezer with animals I have killed myself. The food just tastes better and there is a satisfaction with knowing that you went out and got it yourself…as a proper real man provider.

Who is the most famous hunter in America? If you’re over 30, the first names that come to mind are probably Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent or Dick Cheney. If you’re under 30, the answer is easier. The most famous hunter in America is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook.

In May 2011 Mr. Zuckerberg made a pledge to consume, for one year, only meat he had hunted or slaughtered himself. He got a hunting license and shot a bison. “My personal challenge,” he explained, is “being thankful for the food I have to eat.”

If four new books are any indication, Mr. Zuckerberg is the decidedly nonmacho, non-pickup-driving embodiment of a new breed of American hunter. These young memoirists have loaded their rifles and shotguns for complicated reasons, including culinary one-upmanship. Nothing wows jaded dinner guests like a braised shank of calf moose that you’ve recently “harvested” and “dressed” — hunting euphemisms for killed, skinned and disemboweled — before bringing it to the table.

What feels counterintuitive and new here though is this: These writers have largely taken to hunting, they say, for ethical reasons. They’ve read their Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, their Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer, and are intimate with the horrors of industrial meat production.

They no longer wish to have an anonymous hit man between themselves and supper.

Hi Cam a little off topic , what scope did you end up getting for the .270 and are you satisfied with it?

RightOfGenghis

Would be interested to know whether the Huckster busied himself with the ‘skinning and disembowling’ options, or whether he satiated his hunter instinct by dispatching a hapless bison happily grazing the lower 45, and leaving the messy bits to his army of paid minders. Personally I like to wow my jaded dinner guests with whaleisms. Some of my favs are brotocracy, boy buggerer, kiddie fiddler and front bums